


The Guild of Music and Lyrics and Rock

by funnylookinfella



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Rock Band, F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-15
Updated: 2016-03-24
Packaged: 2018-05-26 21:02:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6255691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/funnylookinfella/pseuds/funnylookinfella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Papyrus and the Skeletones (name not set in stone) get the rug pulled from under their feet when their lyricist and lead singer, Mettaton, quits in favor of a solo career. Desperate for revenge, they're determined to kick his ass at the Battle of the Bands. The only problem? They still don't have someone to write lyrics. That is, until Undyne meets a shy little nerd who just so happens to write surprisingly-readable fandom poetry...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> (title refers to the three things the plot of this fic is primarily a mashup of: The Guild, School of Rock, and Music and Lyrics)

It wasn’t even ten o’clock in the morning, and they were having yet another name conversation.

Undyne, usually full of energy, was sagging slightly as she waited for the waitress to bring the cup of tea she’d ordered. She turned her head and glanced out the window, watching a shorter girl jog up to the crosswalk and hurry across before the light turned green. She barely heard (or rather, chose to barely hear) Papyrus say her name until Sans tossed a sugar packet across the table at her, hitting her in the forehead.

“Augh!” It bounced off and fell into her lap. “What!? You can’t wait until I’m caffeinated?”  
  
“I was saying,” Papyrus continued, as if she hadn’t said anything, “that our band should continue being named Papyrus and the Skeletones. For obvious reasons, considering I am the lead member.”  
  
“Except you aren’t,” Undyne pointed out, unable to keep the smirk off her face. “Mettaton is. Also, only you and Sans are weirdly obsessed with skeletons. Why not... Undyne and the Ass-Kickers?”  
  
“Because it’s inappropriate!” Papyrus sputtered. “What are you going to do when someday, a mother and her children are perusing a record store, and the beautiful artwork of our premiere album catches a young one’s eye, only to have his mother forbid him from purchasing it, only because it has the a-word in it!?”  
  
“Alright, Undyne and the Booty-Kickers, then.” She picked up the scalding hot cup of tea their waitress put in front of her, and took a drink from it despite the fact that she could barely hold it. She saw Sans give her a bemused, knowing look from across the table.  
  
“No!” Papyrus was still talking. “Papyrus and the Skeletones is the perfect name.”  
  
“What if I told you,” Sans said, “that there is already a band that ends with ‘and the skeletones’?”  
  
“Then I would tell them to quit! Because we’re much better than whoever they are! We should copyright it, on the grounds that we’re taking the music business by storm and they should clear the way for us!”  
  
Undyne took a drink of complimentary water to sooth her throbbing tongue.They were barely good. The only reason they were good is because they knew how to play their instruments; Mettaton could barely sing, and he sure as hell couldn’t write songs. He seemed to think they were a dubstep band instead of a ska one, although what sort of dubstep band had someone on trumpet was a mystery to her. He didn’t even spend any time with them outside rehearsals, although none of them had any proof that he had any other friends.  
  
“You look pretty bushed, Undyne.” She looked up to see Sans’s eyes focused on her, like he knew something she didn’t. She hated people who knew things she didn’t. “Work late last night?”  
  
“Yeah,” she lied. No, she hadn’t. Personal trainers, at least in their town, rarely worked past ten. She, however, had been sitting at home with her feet propped up on her coffee table, playing Warlords of Ebott, something she used to scoff at as she blew past it at the store on her way to the sporting goods section.  
  
Now, things were much worse. What had started as a mild curiosity had turned into a nightly hobby, and she’d much rather the rest of them not find out how shallow she actually was, or that she didn’t actually go home and work out for three hours before bed as she claimed she did.  
  
“Day off, though!” she added with a grin. “So I actually have some time to have a life after rehearsal.”  
  
“Speaking of which!” Papyrus stood. “We need to get going! It’s almost time!”  
  
Despite the fact that none of them had ordered anything from the diner beyond Undyne’s tea, the three of them got up and, after she’d paid for it, started the short walk back to Papyrus and Sans’s house.

☆ ☆ ☆

When they opened the door to Papyrus’s garage, Mettaton, who was usually earlier than them by at least a half hour, wasn’t there.  
  
“So he picks now to be fashionably late?” Undyne sneered, sitting on her stool behind the drum set and tapping her sticks together idly. “Check your phone, Paps. Maybe he’s hungover.”  
  
Papyrus took his phone from his back pocket and held it up in front of his face. “Oh. Yes, he did.” His eyes scanned the text message, getting squintier the more he read.  
  
“Jeez, how long is the text?” Sans asked.  
  
“Quite.” Papyrus continued reading, his squinty eyes quickly being replaced by a look of horror. “Oh, no. Oh, god. This is the worst. The WORST!”  
  
Undyne got up and snatched the phone away from him, looking at the text herself and reading it out loud. “Dear nobodies.” She scowled. “As you may have noticed, I am not attending your little band practice today. Or tomorrow. Or any, ever again. After realizing that the rest of the group was smothering my talents, I have decided to pursue a solo career. If you like, you may see my debut at the Snowdin Battle of the Bands on March eighth. I strongly suggest you attend, so that I may inspire you. Forever yours, best wishes, lots of love, XOXO, Mettaton.”  
  
Sans and Papyrus were silence, Papyrus looking incredibly offended and Sans, as usual, looking unreadable. Undyne felt a surge of anger rising in her chest. “That little twerp! I’m gonna kill him!” She started for the door, Papyrus lunging to grab her ankles, which did nothing but make her drag him along the floor a few steps.  
  
“Undyne! Please don’t get arrested again! I don’t have enough money for your bail this time!”  
  
“He wants to have a solo career, huh? He wants us to get inspired by him? Well, mission fucking accomplished, he’s inspired me to go key his car and slash his tires!” She paused, looking back at Sans and Papyrus. “Do you guys have any eggs?”  
  
“Yeah, in the fridge.”  
  
“SANS! Don’t tell her that!” Papyrus scrambled back up to his feet and slid between Undyne and the door. “Don’t do anything extreme! If you get in trouble, we’ll have lost two members instead of one!”  
  
“Does it matter?” she snarled. “One member, two members, either way, he was the guy that wrote our lyrics! None of us can write for shit!”  
  
“Are you saying we should give up?” Sans asked mildly.  
  
“What!?” Undyne whirled around to face him. “No! But... now we’re gonna have to find someone new! And that’s a pain in the ass! So I have to give him an equal amount of pain in HIS ass! Eye for an eye, and all that!” She tried to haul Papyrus out of the way of the door.  
  
“Don’t! Undyne! Stop it!” Papyrus stretched his arms out to cover the length of the door like a trampoline on its frame. “We can still practice!”  
  
“Yeah, and now we can have some more free time,” Sans said, sounding pleased.  
  
That made Undyne stop, letting Papyrus slide to the floor. “...Free time.” She hadn’t considered that. More free time equaled more time playing Warlords of Ebott, without having to make up some lame story about what she was doing instead of rehearsing. She stepped away from the door, crossing her arms over her chest. “Fine.”  
  
“Excellent,” came Papyrus’s voice from below her.  
  
“I’m still gonna walk over and write something in the snow on his windshield,” she added, grabbing her gym bag and sliding her drumsticks back in it. “Any ideas?”  
  
“Something that’ll really piss him off,” Sans said thoughtfully.

☆ ☆ ☆

After walking all the way over to the apartment complex Mettaton lived in and scrawling ‘Cher Sucks Balls’ in the shallow dusting of snow on his front windshield, Undyne headed back to her own place, tossing her bag onto the dining room table and jumping over the back of the couch to sit down. She kicked off her boots and opened her laptop, sliding her headset on over her hair and booting up the game. Seeing a familiar username pop up, she invited the other player into a chat channel.  
  
“Hey, Alphys. What’s up?”  
  
Alphys, or, as Undyne knew her, MewMewAlphy, timidly replied. “Oh... hi. You’re uh, you’re here early.”  
  
“Yeah, practice was a bust. Our fucking lead singer flaked out on us, and now we gotta find someone new.” She grabbed a cup of tea on the table from the night before and gave it a sniff, drinking from it after deeming it safe to drink. “Why, you busy?”  
  
“Oh! No!” Alphys’s voice, the only thing Undyne knew of her, was soft, somewhat breathy, and often stuttering. When they’d first started talking, Undyne had asked her what she’d said every few sentences, encouraging her to talk louder. It seemed to be working. Then again, maybe Undyne was just getting used to her. “I’m uh, I’m just grinding for gold. I wanted to give you something, actually. A p-present.”  
  
“Present?” Undyne grinned to herself. “Not gonna say no to that.”  
  
On the screen, Alphys’s avatar, a cute little reptilian mage with yellow-blonde hair and a glowing pink staff, passed Undyne something from out of her inventory. When Undyne went to check hers to see what she’d been given, her eyes widened. “Woah! No way!” It was a new suit of warrior armor, one that held water inside of it, so that her water-dwelling avatar could stay out of underwater areas as long as it wanted. “This is so badass! You were grinding all day for this?”  
  
“Uh... yeah.” Alphys sounded almost guilty, as if she wasn’t sure whether Undyne was yelling at her or thanking her. “That’s okay, right?”  
  
“Okay? It’s fucking awesome!” Her avatar donned the armor, and it made her snicker when she found it now made tiny slushing sounds when it walked. “Now we can find some other people for our guild.”  
  
“Oh.” Undyne could almost hear Alphys’s face fall. “Um, about that. I was thinking, uhh... maybe... let’s not start a guild. I mean, what’s, um, what’s wrong with just us?”  
  
Undyne frowned. “We could get a lot further with a guild. Get a lot more loot, y’know. I thought that’s what you wanted to do.”  
  
The other end of the chat channel was quiet for a moment. “Actually I um, only w-want to keep playing with you.” Another pause. “N-Not to be creepy! I just, um, I just think we’re doing pretty good together, and why ruin it by meeting other people, I mean, we already know each other, that just sounds like a lot of work, and what if we meet a weirdo, and–”  
  
“Woah, woah, shut up for a sec!” Undyne interrupted, unable to keep the grin off her face, although she knew Alphys couldn’t see it. “That’s fine, dude. We can stick together all you want.”  
  
“...Really?”  
  
“Yeah! Besides, you’re right.” Undyne took another drink of the cold tea on the table. “We are doing pretty good together. I mean, I wouldn’t know shit about this game if you hadn’t taught me how to play. All I did was pick it up at Wal-Mart cause I wanted to know what the big deal was.”  
  
Alphys let out a barely-audible laugh. “But now you’re even better at it than I am.”  
  
“Yeah, right.” Undyne turned her avatar around to face forward. “So how do I look?”  
  
“Great! I mean, great. Can I ask you something, though? You definitely don’t have to answer.”  
  
“Sure. What?”  
  
“Why’d you... um, why’d you give your avatar only one fang?” Undyne looked down at her character, and the single pixelated fang that stuck out of its mouth. She laughed.  
  
“Oh, man. Honestly, it’s kind of my thing now. When I was in high school, I played hockey, and I got a puck to the face during practice. Chipped my front tooth. Everybody called me ‘Fang’ for the rest of the year cause it looks sharp, kinda. I still have it.” She ran her tongue over her chipped tooth.  
  
“You... you don’t wanna get it capped or something?”  
  
“Fuck, no. It makes me look wicked cool. Kinda threatening. Like, did I get this in a gang fight, or did I trip on a toddler and fall on a trip to the grocery store? Who knows?” Undyne went through her character’s inventory, moving her ammunition to the front for easy access. Alphys was quiet for a moment, and when she spoke up again, she sounded weirdly relieved.  
  
“So you don’t care if people are pretty?”  
  
“Why would I?” Undyne got up, carrying her laptop on one arm to the kitchen so she could get something to eat. Setting it down on the counter, she opened up the cupboard and fished out a bag of trail mix.  
  
“I dunno,” she heard Alphys say through her headset. “Most people like pretty things.”  
  
“Not me.” Undyne dumped the trail mix into a bowl. "So are we gonna play, or what? I thought we were gonna team up with that Burgerpants guy's guild for a raid." She carried her laptop back over to the couch and got comfortable. It was gonna be a long night.


	2. Chapter 2

“Uh... Shyren?” Undyne called out of the half-open garage door. “You’re up. Whatcha got?”

A petite, black-haired girl with a mermaid t-shirt ducked under the door and came in to stand in front of them, holding a piece of paper in a trembling hand. “This is... this is called... it’s, um, it’s called... well, I decided to call it...”   
“Untitled?” Sans suggested.

“Yes! Yes, ‘Untitled’,” she hurriedly agreed, before bringing the paper closer to her face and beginning to sing in a very soft voice. So soft, in fact, that neither Undyne, nor Sans, nor Papyrus could hear a word she was singing. Once she finished, she gave them a smile and, for some reason, tried to curtsy with her miniskirt before rushing out, taking the paper with her.

“Well,” Undyne said, plopping down in Sans’s beanbag chair after he got up to refresh his cola. “That was the last one. Twelve responses, and none of them can write for shit. At least, no better than us. What’re we gonna do? Just be instrumental?”

“No!” Papyrus started pacing the room as soon as the garage door was closed again. “No one will get our songs stuck in their heads! No one will sing them in the shower! No one will get them tattooed on their bodies! We must have lyrics!”   
“One of us better get a copy ‘Poetry for Dummies’, then,” Sans said, bringing another beanbag chair, that Undyne had no idea they owned, out from inside the house and sitting in it, ignoring her weirded-out expression.

Papyrus was looking like he was about to run inside and order twelve copies on Amazon, so Undyne interjected. “We don’t need a stupid book to write songs. We can write one right now. What do people write songs about?”

“Romance!” Papyrus declared.

“Thrift shops,” Sans offered.

“Friendship!”

“Wrecking balls.”

“Memories!”

“Red solo cups.”

“Not working,” Undyne interrupted. “What about...” She looked around the room, her eyes landing on Papyrus’s bike. “...Bicycles.”

“There’s already a famous song about bicycles,” Sans pointed out.

“Crap. Uhh...” She looked around again. “Alright... let’s write a song about...” She turned around, her eyes moving past the door into the house and to the storage shelves stuffed with things like canned food, bulk packages of paper towels, bottled water, and... “Garbage bags.”

“Garbage bags!” Papyrus snapped his fingers. “Brilliant! No one’s written a song about plastic bags before!”

Undyne and Sans glanced at each other. “Let’s make it garbage bags specifically,” she hurriedly added. “What rhymes with plastic bag?”

“I’ll get the rhyming dictionary.” Sans was gone back into the house before either of them could say anything.

When he returned, the three of them got comfortable on the garage floor, flipping through the rhyming dictionary and writing down ideas. At some point, Sans had pizza delivered (or went to pick it up; he had a knack for disappearing and coming back without Undyne or Papyrus noticing), and the floor around them became littered with paper plates and cardboard.

“Alright,” Undyne said eventually, standing up with their notebook in both hands. “Here’s what we got:

_Baby, I’m a garbage bag_  
_Wave me around like a battle flag_  
_Actually,that sounds like a total drag  
_ _Fill me up with dirty rags.”_

She stared at the one verse they’d spent hours coming up with, as Papyrus stood and clapped.

“Beautiful! An instant classic!”

“Are you crazy? We just wrote a song that asks people to fill us up with dirty rags! Imagine if the internet got hold of that!” Undyne threw the notebook across the room, watching it hit the wall with a slap. “We’re just gonna have to try harder!”

“If we’re gonna try harder,” Sans said, “we’re probably gonna need another pizza.”

 

☆ ☆ ☆

 

“I never want to give up on stuff, but this is pissing me off,” Undyne grumbled, watching her avatar bisect a goblin with its spear.

“The goblin, or your band?” Alphys asked.

“The band! The goblin’s easy. If writing songs was this easy, we’d have seven platinum records by now.” Undyne used a potion to get her health back to maximum and started following Alphys away from the game area. “Writing lyrics is a lot harder than they make it look.”

“I’m sure you could do it, if you kept trying,” Alphys said, and Undyne could hear the shy edge to her voice. “I think you could do anything.”

Undyne grinned. “I think I could do anything, too. But this is gonna take forever to master.”

“I sort of get it. In high school, I, uh... oh, god, no, nevermind.”

“What?” Undyne’s grin fell into a smirk.

“Well, I, uh... I used to write... poetry. But about anime characters. Oh, god, oh geez, that sounds so bad. That sounds so dorky. I swear, I had more of a life than that.” A pause. “Actually, no, I didn’t, but I swear I thought about things other than anime in high school! And I don’t write it anymore!”

“Oh, my god, that’s not embarrassing, that’s hilarious!” Undyne laughed. “Come on, I told you I chipped half my tooth off in a hockey game in high school, that’s just as dumb! Do you still have any of them? The poems, I mean.”

“What? No!” Alphys trailed off awkwardly. Undyne raised her eyebrows, waiting for her to go on, which, of course, she did. “Maybe a couple. But you seriously don’t want to read them! They’re awful! You’ll never want to speak to me again after you read one. Your eyes will roll so far back into your head you’ll be able to see your brain start to hate me.”

“Come on, come on,” Undyne teased. “We all did dumb stuff when we were kids. They’re probably not even that bad. You gotta laugh at yourself sometimes.”

“...Alright, fine,” Alphys eventually managed, whether from Undyne’s encouraged confidence or just an attempt to get her to stop talking about it. “Hang on.”

Undyne waited, stretching her legs out until her toes reached the end of her bed. She’d always been tall, ever since she was a kid, and beds never seemed to agree with her. There was no way she could manage to fit on a twin bed without some limb or other dangling off, and she didn’t have enough room for anything bigger. That, she thought, was probably why she ended up dozing off on the couch so often. At least she could tuck her feet in the cushion cracks and keep her toes warm.

Eventually, she heard some fumbling on the other side of the chat channel, and Alphys was back. “Okay. I’m just gonna take a picture of it. I found some in an old notebook, but I don’t want to scan it. Unless it’d be easier for you to read if I scanned it. In which case, I can totally scan it. Or maybe I should just type it up...”

“Picture’s fine, dude.” Undyne waited for Alphys to take the photo and send the file, and once she did, it opened automatically. Undyne leaned a little closer to read the scratchy handwriting. “Hey... Alphys...”

Undyne could almost hear her gulp, like in a cartoon. “Y-yeah?”

Undyne grinned. “You ever thought about writing lyrics?”


End file.
